


And Home Before Dark

by Anonymous



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale Fusion, Developing Relationship, F/F, First Time, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 16:16:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11338941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: None of the villagers liked it when Kasia and I moved into the cottage together.





	And Home Before Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Crossed with _Into the Woods_ , if you squint.

None of the villagers liked it when Kasia and I moved into the cottage together.

Not that they noticed at first. We didn’t even notice at first. But then, we weren’t letting ourselves look at it too closely.

In our village, courting starts at seventeen. Some of the boys and girls pair off earlier than that, and everyone pretends to mind but no one does, really. It does a village good to have couples who want each other enough to sneak off to barn lofts or hay bales before they’re of courting age: it means lots of children, usually, and a couple that’s devoted to each other if not. The rest of us, those who aren’t gripped by irresistible passion at fifteen or sixteen, wait until we’re seventeen to accept the invitations that the village boys shyly walk across the village square to deliver at a town festival, or answer the timorous knocks on our parents’ front doors on a summer day, asking us to pick wildflowers in the meadow.

Kasia and I did all that. We turned seventeen within a month of each other, and we danced with the boys and let them pick us wildflowers and tell us how nice the flowers looked in our hair. Then the dates would end and Kasia and I would go back to each other and talk about lots of things, but not the boys very often because they weren’t that interesting. I remember thinking at one point, a few weeks in, that this couldn’t be it—this couldn’t be what the little girls got excited about, counting the months till their seventeenth birthdays. There had to be more to it than this. But I still didn’t understand.

Kasia was quicker than I was, or maybe she just had more opportunity to realize. She had always been the prettiest girl our age, even back when we were young enough for her hair to tumble down her back unpinned in a shower of golden curls that never snarled no matter how long we played outside. That would have been enough to make the boys notice her even if she’d been horrid, but she wasn’t: she was sweet and kind and never lost her temper even when she had reason (and she had plenty of reason, spending time with me). The boys were pulling her curls when we were only ten, and at fourteen she could have had her pick of them. But she didn’t sneak off to the haystacks with anyone, and when we were seventeen, not many months after we started courting, she started turning down invitations.

I remember the first time I witnessed it. Our mothers had sent us into town to buy the week’s flour, and Tommy Wojcek came up to us and asked, half tripping over the words, if Kasia might come with him the next day to pick raspberries in the meadow by the cattle fields. Tommy was one of the nicer boys, and not bad looking; I’d danced with him a few times myself, before he started blushing and stammering every time he saw Kasia.

Kasia smiled at him, and when she smiled like that, you could see why Tommy would blush. “Thank you,” she said, “but no.”

Tommy’s head dropped, and he scuffed at some pebbles with his shoe. “Okaythanksanothertime,” he said, all in a rush, and then he ran off.

“Why did you say that?” I asked Kasia when he was gone.

She lifted her shoulders. “There’s better picking down by the river.”

It wasn’t a real answer, and I started at her for a whole surprised minute until we reached the miller’s.

I had already agreed to go raspberry picking with Jarek the next day. He was one of the relatively small number of boys who asked after me regularly, and I liked him well enough, by which I mean that he rarely said anything that made me want to dunk him in the goat pond. I sat in the sun and picked berries and listened to him drone on about the chicken coop he was helping his father build in the backyard and wondered why I had said yes to this.

“Would you like to come see me and my dad’s work tomorrow?” Jarek asked as we parted ways.

I looked at his kindly freckled face. “Thank you,” I said, “but no.”

I walked home slowly, eating the raspberries. They were delicious.

***

After that, Kasia and I had more free time, because we were spending less of it on romantic walks around the goat fields. We spent it together, as we did almost all of our time.

I still said yes to the occasional suitor. The ones who asked in front of my parents, or the ones whose persistence made me feel guilty for refusing. But I always regretted it once I was hanging off someone’s arm and trying not to yawn too obviously at his conversation.

“They’re all so dull,” I said to Kasia once, breaking our tacit agreement not to talk about it.

She laughed. “It’s hardly their fault,” she said, in her usual way of criticizing someone in the kindest way possible.

It was high summer, and we spent most of our time outside. I liked the outdoors better than Kasia did—which was not to say she didn’t like it, because I liked the outdoors better than almost everyone. I could spend hours picking through a patch of vegetation, finding all the plants that hid curled inside larger ones and figuring out how they grew. Kasia would grow bored of this after a quarter of an hour, so she started bringing her embroidery and sitting in the shade near me while I crawled through the vines. She was good at embroidery, the way she was at most things; her stitches were even and perfect like mine would never be, and when they spun out under her fingers, they looked less like the tidy patterns my mother tried to force on me and more like an actual forest or mountain or sunset: wild and beautiful. Sometimes I would sit beside her and watch her work, until my head dropped onto her shoulder and the colors swirled in my dreams.

We stumbled upon the cottage one day when I was tracking a family of young birds. We were closer to the woods than we were supposed to be—not in it, but near enough to the edge that my mother would have shuddered and pulled me back if she knew. You got lost in those woods, rumor had it. You would lose your way, or be led astray, or vanish entirely; and sometimes, it was said, you would find your heart’s desire and be destroyed by it.

Our village used to cross through the woods to have custom with other villages, generations ago. Then they built roads to go around the thickest parts of it, and now when we want to go to Olshanka or Vyosna we ride the long winding arcs. It takes longer, but you’re much more likely to get where you’re going.

I had always liked the woods, though. I didn’t go in; but their edges were where the most interesting plants lived. My wanderings were often nearer the trees than my parents would have liked, and Kasia came with me, because she was never afraid of anything.

The cottage wasn’t in the woods—just near the edge. I think we both liked it as soon as we saw it. There was something friendly about it: the rough warm colors of the stones, the little windows with their shutters blurred by time. Even with the holes in the roof and the fallen-in corner, it was a nice enough cottage that someone would have claimed it in an instant, if it hadn’t been so close to the woods.

That first day, we explored the whole thing. It was only one room, but we went over all the walls and examined all the nooks and crannies and the deep fireplace—searching, maybe, for some clue about whoever had lived here. Or maybe that wasn’t why we did it, because when we had gone over all of it and were standing in the middle of the floor, hands on our hips, Kasia said, “We could fix this up, I bet,” and my heart leapt and I knew that was what I had been waiting for.

We went slow. We still had chores and other duties at home, and neither of us had ever done work like this before. But we figured it out piece by piece: Kasia asking her father for help cutting new shutters, me going to the stonemason and asking about mortar composition. Most of the stones we needed were still on the ground around the cottage where they’d fallen, but when we needed new ones, I went to the river and held each one in my hands before deciding. Kasia never asked why when I tossed one aside.

The roof was the hardest part. But old Zielinski the carpenter taught us about cutting wood, and we cut strong beams to replace the rotting ones and laid them with thatch the way we’d done when we’d helped repair our parents’ houses as children.

The roof was done before the walls were perfect, and there still wasn’t a door, but it felt a lot more like a real cottage after that. “We could sleep here, sometimes,” Kasia said.

We spent our first night there the shortly after we finished the roof, each snug in our own little nest of blankets taken from our beds at home. We whispered long into the night, even though there was no one around who would have heard us if we’d talked aloud, and I almost couldn’t sleep for the giddy feeling in my chest.

I went home the next morning carrying the folded blankets and found my mother awake at the table, hands clenched around a mug of coffee.

“I know we’ve always given you freedom,” she said, and I saw her white face and ran to her and buried my own face in her shoulder.

“There’s a cottage,” I explained to her later, when she’d made me my own cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge. “Kasia and I have been fixing it.”

“For one of you to live in?” she asked, and I felt myself go red and didn’t answer.

I took her to see it later that day. My mother grew hesitant as we drew nearer to the edge of the woods, and when we came in sight of the cottage, she stopped and stared. “I didn’t know this was still here,” she said.

“You know it?”

“This was your great-grandmother’s,” she said.

She told me the story, though I knew it already; everyone in town knew it. How my great-grandmother had run from the nearby capital when she was barely more than a girl—a princess, they said, though she was probably only a servant girl. She had moved in with a peasant, a baker, and had raised a child who was not her own, and then many more who were. She was my mother’s age when they were all killed in a fire. My grandmother was the only one who got out.

“But this place…” I looked around at the unblackened stones, and my mother shook her head.

“They didn’t live here when it happened. They needed more room for that many children.”

And it was too close to the woods. She didn’t say it, but I could see her thinking it: her eyes on the trees. I wished she’d say something so that I could argue—that near the woods wasn’t in the woods, that I’d been wandering its edges for years. But she didn’t say anything. And I wasn’t moving into the cottage, yet.

“We’re building an irrigation ditch in front of the trees,” I said, and she nodded, though I could see she was unconvinced. Moving water would stop spirits, but that wasn’t the only danger posed by the wood.

Kasia and I finished the walls and we finished the chimney and the dirt of the floor was hard-packed again. We had everything except a door, and when I said that to Kasia, she said to leave it to her.

The weeks passed, and we spent more nights in the cottage, and there was still no door. It was fine because it was still summer, but autumn was coming soon, and already there was a nip in the air sometimes when we woke up in the morning. I wanted to say something, but I bit my tongue, because I didn’t want to ask what we were doing. But if we wanted to keep doing it, we were going to need a door.

I finally said something a few weeks before the harvest. We had just woken up to the birds singing outside, and Kasia’s hair was falling about her face in a square of sunlight from the unshuttered window, and I took my courage in my hands and asked about the door.

“Come over when your chores are done,” she said.

I went to her house after lunch, my hands still wrinkled from scrubbing the laundry in the stream. Her mother pointed me around the back. I pushed through the bushes to see Kasia leaning over—a door.

A door, but not the plain slab of wood I’d been expecting. I’d seen fancier doors, like the ones on the church that had lines cut into them, but this was nothing like that. This was carved over almost its whole surface: plants, flowers, animals spiraling out beautiful patterns, like the vivid beauty of Kasia’s embroidery made solid. I looked at one spot, a bird with its wings spread, and it was perfect down to each individual feather. It looked like it was going to fly off the wood.

Kasia heard my footsteps and looked up. “It’s not quite done,” she said.

I couldn’t speak. My heart was trying to climb out through my throat.

I don’t know what my face looked like, but it must have been awful, because Kasia stood up. “Do you not like it?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I should have checked. We can find something else—plain wood—”

“No.” I found the word, and then I found her hand and squeezed it tight. “No, it’s perfect.”

***

We hung the door as the harvest started. We didn’t have much time after that: everyone pitched in at harvest time, getting paid in grain and produce for the long hours spent threshing and climbing and picking. Everyone went home exhausted every day at dusk, but sometimes Kasia would find me near the end of the day and tap my hand, and we’d both go home to the cottage, when we’d curl up in our bedrooms inside the walls that had become ours.

Our parents didn’t say much about it. I’m not sure what they thought: maybe that we would get tired of it soon enough. That it would stop inevitably when one of us got married. But we weren’t courting anymore—no one had time during the harvest, but we hadn’t been doing much of it before that, either. Most of the boys had stopped asking me by then.

There was a harvest festival when all of the grain had been brought in. We all needed it by that point: we’d been working nonstop for weeks. The dancing started while most of us were still eating, and as soon as I saw the first couple stand up in front of the fire, I went tense.

I tried telling myself that I wasn’t tense, but then Kasia’s father came and asked her if she’d be dancing that night, and I went tenser. It was an odd question to ask, for one thing: everyone danced at a harvest festival. But I was listening closely for Kasia’s answer.

“The Mazur boy came by again today,” her father said. “He was hoping to find you home.”

The Mazurs owned the general store in town. They had far more money than both our families put together, and their son Filek was the match every girl in town wanted to land. I looked down at my stew and wondered if the meat had gone off.

“Thank you for letting me know,” Kasia said, and the next moment, I felt her shoulder settle next to mine.

It stayed there for most of the night, except when we joined in the big group dances where everyone changed partners every eight beats. For the other dances, the ones where the men asked the women to stand up, we walked around the perimeter of the clearing and watched the fire. We could feel Kasia near me the whole time, and even though I wasn’t dancing, I felt like I was.

***

The next day, Kasia brought a small table to our cottage.

She put it by the wall next to the fire, and over the next few weeks, it filled up. Things from her house, or mine: an old cooking pot that hadn’t been used much, spoons with bent handles. A knife that was missing its tip. We cut firewood and piled it by the stove and cooked a meal or two with it, using our own utensils and our own fire, in our own house.

We still didn’t talk about it. But one day when I was at home, my mother came back in her visiting hat and said, “You’ve been spending a lot of time at that cottage.”

It was what I had been braced for. I wondered what people had said to her, when she was out visiting. “Yes,” was all I said.

“That will have to stop once the winter comes,” she said, and my blood pulsed in my neck but I didn’t say anything.

“I suppose it should,” Kasia said, when I brought it up with her the next day.

It was exactly what I hadn’t wanted to hear. “Yeah,” I said, and she went on stitching. She’d started bringing her embroidery and weaving to the cottage. I was sifting herbs, sorting out the ones to be dried for the winter. “Except, why should it?” I burst out a few minutes later.

She looked up at me and held my gaze for what felt like a long time. My cheeks grew hot. “All right,” she said at last. “We should bring our mattresses tomorrow, then.”

I pressed my lips together and nodded.

***

The winter was difficult. We had stores—we had each done our share of the harvesting, and our parents conceded that we deserved a part of the payment for that, even if they weren’t happy about why we wanted it. Every time my mother looked at me, she had a hopeful look in her eyes, like this was the moment I’d tell her I had come to my senses and was moving back. But our cottage filled up and Kasia and I settled in for the cold weather.

When the weather was clear, we chopped more firewood to keep by the stove. When the wind howled, we brought our mattresses close together so that warmth could seep through the blankets. The irrigation ditch froze over and we had to trek to the stream, but neither of us thought spirits would be much of a danger in weather like that anyway. Kasia knit and wove and embroidered by the fire, and I cooked and went out and gleaned what I could: poor gleaning in the winter, but some of the cold-weather berries were safe, and there were stray nuts and mushrooms to be found. And sometimes, if I put my hands on the branches of a bush and felt into the chilled sleeping life within it, I would know where to look. I would have a picture in my mind of what I would find before I found it: a cluster of berries, and handful of nuts missed by the squirrels in their autumn harvest. 

Kasia came with me sometimes when I went gleaning. We didn’t talk about it, but she would stand quiet and warm at my side while I bent over a bush, and there would be something different in her eyes when I pulled out my handful of treasures. I started doing it in part for that look in her eyes.

Those gleanings made bright spots in the dreary sameness of winter meals and stretched our supply far enough to keep us. There was heavy snow that winter, and sometimes we couldn’t get to the stream. We melted snow over the fire and put off washing our clothes and roasted nuts and ate them with tart berry preserves. And we survived.

It was the happiest winter I’d ever known.

Kasia’s cheeks, glowing in the firelight. Her eyes bright and clear in the crisp frosty air. When the snow fell, we used it to build things: snow people and hidey-holes and fortifications, where we staged fights that left us both shivering and laughing and crowding close to the fire when we went back in. Kasia’s nose would be bright red, and I flicked water at her off my hair. We roasted chestnuts and burned our fingers on the shells.

The best part was never having to separate. There were no different houses to go to when the day was done; no lingering at the fork in the path because we wanted to put off the moment of divergence. We were allowed to stay. Sometimes, if there was enough snow, there was no choice but to stay. I would like in my bed after Kasia was asleep, a candle lit so I could keep reading, and instead I would look across at her sleeping face and wonder how there could be so much happiness in the world, and how I was allowed to have it.

We still had dinner with our families on Sundays, and we saw other villagers when we went into town for supplies. As the season went on, we got more and more strange looks. At first I figured it was only the news that we had moved out without courting. But at some point after Christmas I caught someone watching me furtively in the general store, and the whispers I caught between her and her neighbor were about the woods.

We were approached about it the next week. We were in church, my family sitting next to Kasia’s, when Mrs. Mazur swooped down on us. “Just so you know,” she said, “my brother-in-law’s second son was taken by the woods not ten years ago. I would be careful if I were you.”

The creaky old organ started groaning its prelude before we could respond to her, but I felt Kasia go stiff. She stayed stiff longer than the few moments I would have expected, and when I looked at her during the first reading, her face was drawn tight—very slightly, in ways only someone who knew her very well would notice. I looked a question at her, but she just shook her head and pressed the side of her hand against mine on the bench. 

The service was dreadfully long that day. I fidgeted more than I had since receiving my first communion, enough so that my mother put a quelling hand on my knee halfway through the sermon.

When the Mass was over, Kasia looked mostly normal, but she was quiet. “What’s wrong?” I asked her in a low voice as our parents chatted with neighbors.

“What Mrs. Mazur said…” Kasia began, and I went cold down to my shoes. She was silent for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to go on. Then, “Can we go home?”

She didn’t say anything else until we were back in the cottage, sitting close together on her pallet like we had when we were children. I was fighting the urge to fuss: tuck a blanket around her, get her something to drink. Forestall what she was going to say, maybe. But I settled for playing with the buttons on her sleeve, running my thumb back and forth. “What Mrs. Mazur said,” Kasia said. “I was there for it.”

I was so surprised my hand stilled. “I never knew about that,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “It was when you were away—when you were visiting your cousins in Vyosna, that summer we were eight. I forgot about it after that. I think I convinced myself it was a dream. But hearing her talk about it today…”

“What happened?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

“I was playing with some of the other children, and the older kids were telling each other to do stupid things. Climb this tree, lean out over this drop, you know. And one of the other boys dared Jakob to run into the forest.”

“Stupid,” I said.

“Yes,” Kasia said. “There was a tree he was supposed to touch. An oak. He was laughing at the others, saying it was easy. Then he ran in and got to the oak—I remember he stood there looking back at us, his face hard to see in the shadows, but he looked pleased with himself. Like he’d shown us. And then—”

My heart was beating too fast. “And then?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I think I must have turned away and missed what happened. But at the time, I thought…it seemed like he’d disappeared before my eyes.”

“Disappeared,” I repeated.

“None of us knew where he’d gone,” she said. “We wanted to go in after him. It seemed like…he had to be somewhere close. But one of the older kids stopped us finally, made us go back to town and tell someone.”

“Good.” I was gripping her wrist too hard. “Good.”

“My mother didn’t believe me when I told her. I probably sounded crazy, saying Jakob disappeared into thin air. But she must have talked to other people after that, because all the men were out late that night, and when she came to tuck me in, she didn’t tell me to stop making up tales. She told me not to think about it anymore.”

“Did they find him?”

She shook her head. “None of us ever heard anything about it after that.”

I looked out the window at the tree branches waving in the wind and felt a chill. People disappeared—it happened, especially with kids, and it usually only meant carelessness. But it didn’t feel like it, somehow. Maybe because Kasia was scared: I never saw her scared of anything, ever.

“Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?” I asked. “Why hadn’t I heard anything about it until today?”

She shrugged. “You know how people are, when it comes to anything unnatural.”

I did. It was why the two of us never talked much about certain things. Why I never gleaned in front of anyone else. Most people were afraid of it, and they didn’t have anything so good as Kasia’s reason for it.

I had led her to the edge of the woods so many times. I had led her to a cottage under its eaves. I wondered at how much braver she was than I had ever guessed: to go on not being afraid. “If you want—if it’s too much. We can still—”

“No!” she said, as if she were surprised by the suggestion. There was half a laugh in her voice. “Nothing’s changed. But…” She hesitated for a moment. “We shouldn’t go into the woods.”

“No,” I said, and tipped my head to rest it on her shoulder.

***

Kasia and I were both at my parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon when my brother’s wife announced that she was pregnant.

Alek was a year and a half older than me and had been married the winter before I turned seventeen. His wife, Mela, stood next to him and beamed when he made the announcement.

The neighbors probably heard my mother’s shriek of joy. Everyone dropped what they were holding and raced to hug the happy couple. I stood frozen.

I was pulled into it soon enough, my aunt turning to hug me, and I thawed enough to remember how to hug back. Then Alek clapped me on the back and said, “You’ll be next, little Agnieska!” and the smile fell off my face.

After that, it seemed everywhere I looked that spring, there were babies: tiny toddlers running around on the grass. Babes in arms cooing into their mothers’ shoulders. Glowing wives with hands over full bellies. I tried not to look at them, because it only made my stomach hurt.

I didn’t tell Kasia about it. Neither of us had been out with a boy since the harvest festival. It felt almost like we’d been living in a cocoon of borrowed time this winter, sheltered from the outside world inside our cottage, and now that the world was thawing, possibilities were opening up.

I didn’t want them to. Possibilities could stay right where they were as far as I was concerned.

But I saw Kasia’s face, too, as she watched the babies in the town square. We were the same age our mothers were when they started having children: new brides, flushed with new love and new families. And here we were, not any kind of brides at all.

There was a spring fever tang to the feeling: wanting things to be different without wanting them to change at all. I tasted it often in the silences between us, the words in the air that weren’t being spoken.

One night Kasia paused while drying a dish. “Have you ever wanted,” she said, and my own dish slipped in my hands.

“What?” I asked when she didn’t continue. My tongue felt thick in my mouth.

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. She went back to drying, but I didn’t move. I was watching her: her face so smooth, a hint of merriness always lurking under the surface, but calm, so calm, as if she could never want anything with the gnawing hunger that was eating into my gut.

She looked up at me after a minute, and her eyes weren’t calm. I felt her glance all the way down to my toes.

That night I sat close to her in front of the fire, even though it wasn’t very cold anymore. I felt like something was off kilter within me, and when I looked at her face in the firelight, it got worse.

She took my hand. It helped a little. “Cold?” she asked when I shivered.

“No,” I said, but I leaned against her anyway.

***

There was money that needed to be made once the snow melted. We didn’t need much: a little food, occasional thread or soap or shoes. But those things cost more than nothing.

Kasia sold the cloth she wove. She bought yarn, and she knitted sweaters and blankets; she bought embroidery thread, and she adorned dresses. I couldn’t make anything so beautiful, so I went gleaning. Finding things was even easier in the spring, when everything was bursting with life. If I went gleaning for several hours a day, I could gather all we could use plus enough extra to sell for things like milk and flour and meat.

“And we cook like kings,” Kasia said.

“I hope the king has someone else to do this for him,” I said, happily enough, as I rolled out the pie crust with the creaky old rolling pin.

It was enough. Not enough for luxury, but enough to be able to turn a deaf ear when my parents made noises about my coming home. Enough to buy a new cooking pot, a solid one that would heat evenly all the way through. Enough to keep Kasia lying next to me on the first really warm night of spring, on our backs in the grass with too many stars above to count and the tips of my fingers tingling with how near she was.

The next week, she was taken by the woods.

***

I almost missed seeing it happen. I was out gathering parsley root, which involved having my nose to the dirt and not looking up at the sky, so I didn’t see the thunderclouds gathering. I was far enough from the cottage that I didn’t hear Kasia calling my name, either. The wind started whipping eventually, though, and that made me straighten up and shiver.

Then I did hear Kasia calling my name: faint, carried by the wind. “Here!” I called back, but the wind was in my face, so she couldn’t have heard it. I took up my basket and headed toward her instead, tromping as fast as I could against the wind, feeling it crawl under my collar and smelling the sharpness of impending rain.

It was mid-afternoon, but the light had fallen, so at first didn’t see her, either. Then I did, outlined against a field. She wasn’t facing me. I waved, but the branches were waving, too, so I didn’t think she saw.

I heard it at the same time she did, to judge by the way her body jerked: a cry, coming from the woods. Almost human, like a female voice. A voice that sounded almost like—

Kasia turned and sprinted for the woods. I ran after her, but she was much closer to the tree line than she was to me. “Kasia!” I shouted, and the wind whipped the words out of my throat, and she was at the trees.

The trees weren’t so close together here. I could still see her when she ran in among them. I saw her pause and turn around in confusion, looking for the source of the cry. I saw her eyes lock on me, standing just outside the woods.

Then I saw her vanish.

“ _No._ ” A gasp, a gut-punch. Kasia had not disappeared. She had not.

I was already running into the woods. The spot where she’d been swallowed up was burned into my mind’s eye; it might have been lit by a lightening flash for how well I saw it. It was a patch of earth just to the left of a big branching oak. I fell to my knees in the dirt and started scrabbling. The soil was loose under my hands, crumbling and blowing in the wind as I threw it aside, but as soon as I got a few inches down, it was dense and full of rocks. I scratched at them with my nails until my fingers hurt, and I was only a half-dozen inches into the earth, and there was no Kasia. I bent over and rested my forehead on the dirt as the breath screamed through my teeth.

No plants. There were no plants on the ground here.

I lurched to my feet. It was almost a perfect circle of bare earth, even the parts where I hadn’t been digging. Maybe three feet across. Unnatural.

I needed a shovel. I needed…

The rain started to fall as I ran toward the village. By the time I got to my parents’ house, I was soaked, water squelching between my clothes and my skin. I opened the door and burst inside, water and mud streaming off me onto the floor.

They all stared. My parents were there, and my little brothers and sisters, and Alek and Mela with her round belly. They were all sitting around the fire while I wanted in front of them like a beast come from the heart of the storm.

“It took her,” I said. “The woods took Kasia.”

***

In the end, Alek was the only one who would come back with me. My parents spoke in gentle voices about accepting what was, about the danger of living so near the woods, and I gritted my teeth to keep from lashing out at them. I think Alek only came with me out of pity, but I didn’t care: he was there. We would find her.

We slogged through the storm with shovels in our hands and scarves around our faces to keep out the worst of the rain. Alek was moving so slowly: I would race ahead, feet slipping in the mud puddles, and when I turned around, he’d be thirty paces back. I wanted to scream.

“You’ll never get her back if you turn your ankle on the way,” he said, still moving at his deliberate, plodding pace.

It was so like what Kasia would have told me. I wanted to drop everything and run into the woods after her.

We reached them at least. “It was here,” I said, leading the way to the spot under the oak tree. “Right here, come on.” I dug my blade into the earth.

Alek stood beside me, not moving to dig. When I looked up at him, he was looking back at me, squinting against the rain.

“What are you waiting for?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Agnieszka.”

I shook him off. “What?”

“We’re not going to…”

He looked at the ground, then the trees, then back at me for a long moment, rain pelting down between our faces.

“I’m digging,” I said. I could feel the back of my throat scraping my tongue. “Help or go home.”

He helped. Together, we dug into the earth, the dirt made heavy from the falling rain. We had to fling it far away from the hole so that it wouldn’t go sliding back in. My hands cramped around the sodden wood of the handle and rubbed raw in spots, so that pain stabbed me with each cut into the earth.

Finally, when we were thigh-deep in a hole, Alek straightened up. “Agnieszka.”

I kept digging. I didn’t look up.

“This isn’t going to work.”

“No.” I started digging faster. The earth fought back at me: we were deep in among the roots of the oak now, thick gnarled branches that resisted each shovel blow.

“She couldn’t have fallen in here. It isn’t a sinkhole.”

“I saw her.” I stabbed uselessly at a root, blade spitting back flecks of mud that got into my eyes with the rain.

Alek put his hand on my shovel. I fought him for it, but my hands were stiff and numb, and he won. I fell to my knees on the earth and dug with my hands instead. My fingers wormed into the mud. It buzzed beneath my skin, like the buried life in the wintry bushes. I tried to grasp at it, to make it show me where she was, but it fled before me—I couldn’t hold on—

Alek hauled me up. I lashed out, clawing at his chest and arms and shoving him away. He got his hands around my upper arms and held on. I screamed at him, and then my rage gave way and I collapsed against him, heaving for air against his chest.

When my sobs had quieted, he led me back to the cottage. He wanted to bring me back to my parents’ house, but I wouldn’t let him. Instead, he bandaged my hands with his own clumsy ones—he had blisters of his own, raised and red, but he paid them no heed—and laid me down on my pallet.

When he was done, he hovered awkwardly in the doorway. “I’ll…send someone to check on you.”

“In the morning.” I didn’t recognize my own voice, scraped and raw.

He hesitated. “In the morning.” The door creaked behind him.

I waited until I could be sure he was out of sight. Then I got up and tore off my clothing.

There wasn’t much point in getting dry. But I put on everything I had that was warmest: my long underwear, my woolen skirt, the boots I wore to walk in the snow, the sweater Kasia had knitted for me. I wrapped some food in a napkin and some matches in oilcloth and took a lantern and a waterskin. I hesitated for a moment, then took the sharpest knife and tucked it into my parcel.

Then I headed into the woods.

I didn’t know where I was going. But I didn’t question myself: this was the only thing to do. Even trying and failing was preferable to sitting back in the cottage.

I went inward from the spot where Kasia had disappeared. It wasn’t easy walking. The storm was still raging, and the trees were thick enough to make it dark but not thick enough to keep out the wind and rain. There were no paths in this part of the woods—or rather, there were many things behaved like paths for a while, before they vanished into thick brambles that grabbed at my legs and hands until I managed to fight free. I was glad of the the boots and the long underwear.

That was all fine while it lasted. The bad part was when I got used to it and found a rhythm of pushing through brambles, and then my mind was free again.

It was all right; I didn’t have to think. It would be like gleaning: I just had to scour the woods until I found what I wanted. I was good at that. I wasn’t patient in most things, but give me a patch of greenery and I could lose myself in it for hours, finding every interesting leaf and twig and bud while Kasia sat nearby and let color spin out under her fingers.

Kasia. Kasia…

I could spend the rest of my life going over every inch of the woods like I did every inch of the patches of vegetation at its edge. I don’t get lost; I might not know where I’m going, but I always know where I’ve been, and I would search the whole forest if I had to. I had nothing else to do.

I struck something like a real path a few hours in. It was getting dark by then: properly dark, not the grim gray of the thunderstorm. The storm was calming down, just a drizzle in my face, but still too much for my lamp to properly light. My steps were lagging, feet sore in my boots, and my hands ached under their bandages.

The path was a relief. It was little enough used that leaves sprouted from its soil, but it was wide enough that I could walk in the middle without so much as brushing the trees, and it went roughly in the direction I was going.

I went along it for a quarter of an hour before I saw a light in the distance. I didn’t think it was her—not Kasia, not even whatever had taken her, most likely. But my heart fluttered in my chest for it anyway.

I came to a stop next to the trees, but not soon enough to avoid being heard. The light bobbed ahead, and a voice called out, “Who goes there?”

It was a man’s voice. Not Kasia.

There was a pause, and then the voice spoke again. “Look, if you’re a monster, you’d better go ahead and eat me now. This weather isn’t improving me any.”

It wasn’t a voice I knew. “I’m not a monster,” I said.

“You sure about that?” The light bobbed nearer, and I could see his face. A man, his face plain and lined. It came over in astonishment at the sight of me. “What in the blazes is a girl like you doing in the middle of the woods on a night like this?”

“You’re here.”

“Not by choice.” He hefted the ax in his hand, but not like it was a threat. “Got turned around in the storm. You don’t happen to know the way back to Olshanka, do you?”

“No. Sorry.”

He nodded. “Didn’t guess you for much of a wood traveler. What brings you here?”

I hesitated. He seemed ordinary, but I had heard enough stories about the wood. “Looking for someone,” I said finally.

I watched his face go from bemused to horrified. “Oh, no, miss, you don’t want anything to do with that.”

“With—what?” My heart sped up. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing worth speaking of with the dark falling, that’s for certain.” He looked over his shoulder, like the woods were about to pounce on us. “Why don’t I help you find a place to hunker down for the night? As soon as it’s light, you can—”

It was almost certainly an innocent offer, but I didn’t have any patience for it. “Where do they take them?”

He shook his head. “It’s only stories. I’s—look.” He fingered the handle of his ax. “I’ve been walking this forest for years. I know a few things. You don’t eat anything you find here, you don’t stop under the oaks, and you don’t go looking for what’s in the center, no matter who you’ve lost.”

“So there’s something in the center,” I said.

“Why don’t you let me help you home?” he said. “This path should lead us south, and when the daylight comes—”

“Thanks.” My sore feet were itching to move. “But I have to find her.”

For a moment I thought he was going to protest more forcefully, and a weary part of me steeled itself to resist. But in the end he just nodded. “All right. You just remember what I said.”

***

I went on.

The rain stopped sometime before midnight. I lit my lantern, and it cast strange shapes and shadows around me, as if the woods had been replaced by somewhere eerie and foreign. I was impatient, and I had no time for fear, but I hurried on a little faster whenever I heard branches breaking behind me. I kept remembering the stories my mother would tell us when we were small: questing spirits roaming the forest, trying to finish what they couldn’t in life. Anytime I did stop for a moment’s breath, I saw leaves that twisted into shapes I’d never seen before, and it made me start moving again sooner than I would have.

Several hours after I left the woodcutter, there was a screech from the trees nearby, so loud and so close that I dropped my lantern and stumbled backwards. I slipped on the wet leaves and fell on my backside. The lantern rolled, and the shadows tipped crazily; and from their center rose something huge and dark and winged, like the fury of darkness made flesh.

I screamed. I couldn’t help it. The thing rose up above my head, monstrous and black against the shape of the trees. “ _Flee_ ,” it said, its voice harsh and gutteral, and if I had had my feet under me right then, I might have. I felt a shiver of power pass through me, like the thud of sound when one rock is dropped on another, and it was almost something I could grab hold of and use. But it slipped away.

I couldn’t flee, anyway. Not unless I wanted to be safe at home, alone, without—

“Where is she?” I asked, my voice higher than usual.

“ _Flee_!” the shape said again, its voice rising higher, its wings spreading. Except this time, maybe because I had just heard it in my own voice, it sounded almost as if the thing was—

I stayed still, pushing against the strong impulse to stay as far away as I could, and listened. I heard the flapping of those dark wings—telling me, every second, that I wasn’t safe, that I should run—and then I heard it: the small choked cry of a thing in pain.

I had not imagined it this time. My lantern was on the ground near my foot, buried under leaves; I couldn’t go close enough to pick it up with my hands without going unimaginably close to the thing in the tree, but if I stretched my foot just right, I could hook the handle—barely—

I got a grip on it and pulled it toward me, scrambling back at the same time as hissing came from the thing. Once I had the lantern in my hand, I stood up and set my shoulders and took a good look at what was in front of me.

A bird. A large bird—the size of an eagle, maybe, with large wide wings and cruel curving claws. Its plumage was the bright jewel blue of the stained glass above the altar of our church. It snapped its beak at me, but it was tangled up in vines, and it shrank back when I shone the light on its face.

“Don’t come any closer,” it spat.

I flinched at hearing a voice come out of its mouth. Like I had put my foot down expecting earth and found a hole. It was frightening, but not in the way of a threat. The bird’s wings were spread—menacing—but one of them was at a funny angle, and I had seen the vines and heard that gasp of pain.

“Don’t come any closer, or I’ll put your eyes out,” it said, voice rising again.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. My voice was a little shaky, but recovering. “You’re caught in the vines, and your wing is broken.”

“I could get out if I wanted to!” it said, almost a shriek.

I was put strongly in mind of my younger cousins, fighting against sleep when they were overtired. “Yes? Let’s see you do it, then.”

Its feathers ruffled up, and then it stopped with another pained gasp. Its wings sagged a little. “Don’t—you’re not—she’s going to take me.”

“Who?”

“ _Her_.” The bird’s voice was high and liquid and strange but full of things I recognized: the desperation and fear in the face of the inevitable. “She always wants birds. We’re so hard to catch alive…”

Its eyes were glassy and vague. “Who?” I asked again, and they fixed on me.

“The witch,” it said.

The shiver wasn’t like before: it felt like a tickle from the outside, all down my spine. “Tell me about her.”

“She’ll take me.” The voice had gone higher. “She’ll take you. She’ll take anyone she wants, and she wants all of us, all the time…”

I took a step closer, and it tensed. “Stand back!” it screeched.

I showed it the knife, handle first. “I’m just going to cut your bonds.”

It was a long process, it letting me get close enough to fumble with my blistered hands. It kept flinching away as soon as I came close to touching it, and that made it moan from the pain in its wing and made me back off so that I didn’t stab it by accident. I wondered how long it had been here without food and with no water but the rain.

When it was finally free, it tried to flap its wings but couldn’t. It collapsed on the ground and hissed when I tried to move it into a better position.

“Where is the witch?” I asked.

“I need to get back,” it said. “They’ll be looking for me.”

“You can’t get back. You can’t fly,” I said. “Where can I find her?”

***

It turned out the bird didn’t know how to find the witch on the ground. It kept repeating to me that I needed to turn left after the island by the great blue way. “And then you’ll reach the part we can’t fly over,” it said, so that wouldn’t have been helpful anyway.

We were walking again by this point. I was too impatient to sit still for a conversation that was going in circles anyway, and the bird wasn’t willing to be left on the ground. It seemed to have grasped that I wasn’t dangerous by this point, and it had let me wrap it in my scarf and hold it as we walked. It wasn’t exactly a cuddler, though.

It also didn’t understand why I wanted to find the witch. “But she’s bad,” it kept saying. I tried to explain about Kasia; I don’t think the bird really understood, but it did finally grasp that I was rescuing a nestmate. “Nestmates look out for each other,” it said. Its voice was growing sleepy.

I was fading, too. Not that I was at risk of falling asleep anytime soon—there was still the urgency, pushing me on—but the world was growing dull around me, my feet dragging

“What other things are you afraid of in the forest?” I asked the bird before it could fall asleep entirely, trying to keep myself alert.

“Her,” it said, as if I didn’t know. “Her creatures. The burrowers.”

“The—” My heart gave a thump in my chest. I saw it again: the ground opening under Kasia. “The burrowers? What are they?”

“Not scary to birds.” It was leaning back, its face shadowing in the light of the lamp as the wind whipped around us. “No need to worry.” It rolled its head around, like it was working out a kink. Then it jerked upward and opened its beak and screeched.

I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around in the darkness, looking for the threat, and the wind swirled around my head again and another bird screeched from above.

The bird in my arms screeched back—“Okay, enough of that.” I held it at arm’s length from me.

“They’re here!” it said, and then the wind resolved into two other great birds swirling down around me, even larger than the one in my arms, one a shimmering silver-gray and the other violet. They landing on trees to my left and my right.

“Windbeak. We have been searching,” the gray one said. Its voice was more resonant than my bird’s—Windbeak’s—and it turned its sharp eyes on me. “What have you done to him?”

“She saved me,” Windbeak said, voice full of happiness, and the new bird relaxed its stance and inclined its head to me.

“I am Straightwing,” it said. “You have saved our nestmate. How may we repay you?”

My mind hadn’t caught up with the two new talking birds, but there was no question about my answer to that. “Actually.”

The birds didn’t want to tell me where the witch was. “She is to be avoided,” the violet one said—a higher voice, flutier. But Straightwing finally relented.

“There is a track you groundlings use,” it said. “It is a single flap that way.” It indicated a direction. “Keep on it until you reach the water, and then keep straight on towards the highest ground.”

“Okay,” I said. They weren’t the best directions I’d ever received, but better than I expected to get from a bird.

“If you get there,” it said, “don’t eat the fruit.”

I left Windbeak in their care. They might not be able to carry him off, but at least they’d be able to guard him and bring him food. I left him on the ground, on my scarf, and I stroked my finger over his forehead.

“I’m glad your nestmates found you,” I said, and he nipped gently at my finger.

There was a tug on my cloak as I went to turn away: Straightwing. “In case you’re ever in danger,” it said in its sonorous voice. It dropped something in my hand: a single smooth, polished stone, the size of my thumb to its first joint. Then it bowed its head again.

I could see how this stone would be a weapon for them: how they could drop it from hundreds of feet and kill someone below. “Thank you,” I said. I slipped it into my pocket and left the birds’ glowing jewel eyes behind me.

***

I found the path the bird had told me about and headed along it. It was the deepest part of the night now, and the world began to take on an unreal quality: as if reality were blurring into a dream. The plants around me were strange ones I didn’t recognize. I followed the path, but I kept being haunted by the feeling that I wasn’t where I had been a moment before—as if I were falling asleep for a moment at a time and waking up somewhere unfamiliar.

I’ve said before that I don’t get lost. Kasia and I used to play games with it when we were kids: she would blindfold me and turn me around until I was dizzy and then ask me to point to the direction of my house. I could always do it, like finding the berries no one else could see. That was what made it so frightening now: that sense was slipping away from me. I kept reaching for it only to find a fuzzy absence, as if I’d been severed from the world I came from. As if I were somewhere else entirely.

The trees shivered and reached for me in the bobbing light of the lantern. Their leaves were pointed and contorted and moved in strange ways. My boots snagged on hidden roots. The night was black and formless around me and Kasia was—

No. I wasn’t going to think about that. I was going to find her.

I didn’t find the river. The path dissolved around me before I could reach it. I kept going, slogging through bushes with huge wicked thorns that grabbed at my legs with each step. I just had to keep on in the same direction. I was facing the right way—no, I was a half-turn off. No, it was a half-turn in the other direction. No—

I stopped underneath a tree, drooping with weariness and frustration and impatience, and the ground opened under me.

***

My body fell with a jerk. I had time to think, _This is it; it’s my turn now_ , and then the ground crashed into me and jarred all my bones.

I sat up. It was utterly dark. I was inside something that felt closed in, like I had fallen into a hole with a roof. The air smelled close and damp and earthy.

A soft brushing sound came around me in the dark, like someone trailing cloth on the ground. Fear crept over my skin like shivers in the cold.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Who’s there?” 

There was no answer. My feeling of dread grew: the creeping sense that something was very wrong. The air had changed—it was sweet now, almost soothing. I felt my breathing slow and my eyes start to close.

My spike of alarm cut through the drowsiness. I felt the shivering rush of power again—the one I’d felt when I’d fallen before the bird, but this time it was stronger, from outside and inside me. I caught hold of it and pushed it out of me, hard.

A scream rent the air—not mine. I fell back, limp against a wall of earth.

I scrambled to my feet right away. I felt shaky and strange, like I’d spent a whole night throwing up, but I groped in my pocket for the knife and held it out. “Who’s there?” I asked again.

A whimpering came from the ground near my feet. “Please, no more,” it said, in a muffled gargle of a woman’s voice, like someone speaking through a mouthful of food. “Have mercy on a poor burrower.”

I didn’t think I could do it again—I didn’t know how I’d done it the first time, and I didn’t want to think about it—but the creature didn’t need to know that. “Why should I?” I took a step forward, knife clenched in my fist. “You captured me.”

“I had to.” The voice sounded like it was breathing through mud. “She made me. She wanted more.”

“She?” I asked, though I knew from the creeping feeling along my spine.

“The witch!” The mud-breathing was getting more hysterical. “She said she wanted—the girl, she said, and then—”

I leapt before I knew I was going to. I still couldn’t see anything, but my hands in the dark were full of that same strange tingling that guided my hands to the living fruit. I got one hand on a thick hairy pelt that was trying to twist away from me, and even with the twisting the knife knew where to go: up and in and straight to the throat of it, towards the vulnerable neck where the blood would—

“Mercy!” it cried.

I stopped, breathing hard. The blade of my knife pressed against its hide. There was still a large part of me that wanted to slice through: the part that had been walking all night and didn’t know if it would ever see Kasia alive again. “Where have you taken her?” I asked. “The other girl. Where is she?”

“The witch wanted her.” The thing sounded like it could barely talk. “She took her. I didn’t want to bring her. Please.”

“And then me.” I still had my hand wound in its wiry fur. “She wanted me, too?”

“Didn’t want you in the woods. She said—I had to, please, or she would have done it to me, too, the green death—”

My hand clenched involuntarily on its fur. “All right,” I said. “Bring me.”

There was a silence, confused. The burrower’s breathing was loud in the cavern, labored.

“You’re supposed to bring me, right?” I said sharply. I took my hand out of its fur and put the knife back in my pocket, though I left my hand on the hilt. “So bring me.”

“But—” Its voice was small and still thick. “You want to go to the witch?”

Impatience tightened my stomach. “She’s going to kill you if you don’t.”

“But if I do, you’ll…”

It was probably right. “That’s mine to worry about.”

There was another moment’s silence, just the burrower’s thick breathing. “If you…all right,” it said.

I was hit with a gust of wind, like a wall had opened somewhere. The air blowing in my face was damp and earthy. A sense of pressure grew, a little bit of the tingly unnaturalness in it. It built up in the air around my body until I felt that something would have to give.

The creature nudged my leg. “I could tell her I couldn’t find you,” it whispered. “I could shove you back out onto the top of the earth, and you’d be free.”

My shoulders ached with urgency and with the pressure around me. “You did this so you wouldn’t lose your life,” I said. “Well, I had something I can’t lose, too, and I’ll only get it back if I go to the witch. So send me.”

There was a moment where the world wavered. Then the pressure around me buckled, and the world changed.

It was worse than falling through the earth. Then, I was only jarred; this time I was sickened, stomach lurching so that I had to hold myself rigid to keep from retching. I breathed deep, but that was worse: the air itself made me want to heave. It was thick with—with the buzzing that had fled from my fingers in the earth. With wrongness. With power.

My stomach settled after a few long moments, and I got myself up. Looked around to see where the burrower had sent me.

I was in a grove of plants. Fruit trees, short and round and heavy with fruit, and vines and bushes running riot at their feet. Vegetables, and berries, and sprouting beans—every kind of edible plant I’d ever seen, all miraculously in season at the same time. All visible because they glowed with a faint green light.

And underneath each plant was a body.

They were in the earth, but I could see them anyway: as if the soil were no match for the slightly shimmering light that shone from them. Human bodies. Animals. Birds. Monsters I had never seen before. They were intact, not decayed, lying as if they were asleep. But roots grew into their chests and twisted among their ribs.

I felt dizzy. I needed to look at their faces, but I couldn’t make myself do it—too afraid of what I would see. Even seeing someone else I had known, someone who’d passed through our village once, would have been a horror. And to see Kasia—I closed my eyes against the glowing green. And then opened them again and made myself look, breathing hard, made myself study the unfamiliar faces. 

And old man, as gnarled as as the tree bark that grew out of him. A woman my mother’s age with hair that spread through the earth like roots. The green flush in the cheeks of a child, no older than six, so small and frail that I had to look away—

Into the face of the witch.

She stood at the other end of the garden. She was old, so old her skin looked fine as dust, but I couldn’t see that at first. All I could feel was her presence. It cut deep into me and made me afraid, the same as the presence of fire makes you warm or darkness makes it hard to see. I looked at the witch and my knees went liquid and I trembled.

I had known all along, in the back of my mind, that when I faced the witch, I would fail. But I hadn’t let myself think it. If I had thought about how hopeless it was, I wouldn’t have done it, and I had to do it. It wasn’t a choice.

“Have some fruit,” she said, in a voice that quivered in all the leaves at once. She held out an apple to me.

I don’t think I would have taken it, even without the warning. The very sight of it screamed danger. The air was thick with wrongness, and my stomach turned at the idea of it.

“No, thank you,” I said, in a voice that just barely trembled.

She smiled. Horribly. “What brings you to my garden, little girl?”

I was having trouble standing up. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the knife in my pocket and called on whatever it was that helped me find the berries no one else could find. If it ever wanted to give me anything, it could show me the way now.

“You’ve taken my friend,” I said.

Her cackle was the snapping of bark in the frost. “I’ve taken a lot of people’s friends.”

I felt their numbers around me, dozens and dozens, ranks arrayed against my success. Surely some of them had had friends who had tried to get them back, too. “One tonight,” I said. “A girl. My age. I want her back.”

“Of course you do.” The witch took a step towards me, apple still held out.

My back went stiff. I wondered if this was how the bird had felt, waiting helplessly in the tree before me, or the burrower when I’d held a knife to its neck. I had no way to fight her. My knife blade would do nothing against someone who had that much magic rolling off her skin.

“Did you want to see her? She’s right over there.” The witch gestured through the trees.

I didn’t want to see her like this, except that of course I did. Even if this was a trap, I had to see her. I followed the witch’s finger.

She was there: buried under the earth, glowing faintly. A tiny cluster of leaves was growing from the center of her chest.

I fell to my knees in front of her. It was her, as I’d only ever seen her sleeping: face relaxed, mouth slightly parted. Calm and so lovely it hurt. She might have been on the pallet next to mine. She might have been in reach of my hands.

I tried to reach for her now, to dig through the earth. But my hands wouldn’t move that way, no matter how hard I strained. The witch’s power pushed back at me. I tried to push through it with whatever power my hands had found tonight, but it wasn’t enough, or it was still spent from attacking the burrowers. It was like trying to push through a brick wall with a thimble. I tried until tears gathered in the corners of my eyes and then I fell back, gasping.

“I wouldn’t bother if I were you.” The witch had come up behind me, and I jumped. “My children are not so easily taken.”

“She isn’t yours,” I scraped out. My fingers were buzzing like I’d put them against the outside of a rattling carriage for too long, and Kasia’s face was pale green under the earth and out of my reach.

“She isn’t yours, either,” the witch said. “They’re so hard to hold onto, the people in our lives.”

“So let her go.”

The leaves around me shivered with mirth. “What would you give me to have her back?”

I stood up to face her. I didn’t have to think about it. “Anything. I’d give you anything.”

“Would you give me yourself?”

That made me pause. If I took Kasia’s place—we would never be together. Never sit in our tiny house on the edge of the woods, never wander in the sun. But Kasia would be free.

“She’s a lovely one, your friend,” the witch said. “The things I could grow out of her…but you.” The witch took a step closer, heedless of the knife, and her eyes glittered with something that might have been greed. “You have power. The fruits that would spring from your life. Those would be worth tasting.”

I shivered, damp clothes clammy against my skin. If I could ask Kasia, I knew what she would say. I tried to decide how much I cared.

If I did this, Kasia would be free. But it wouldn’t be what she wanted.

“A bargain,” I said. “Give me a chance to win our freedom. Mine and Kasia’s. If I fail, I’ll take the fruit.”

The witch arched one eyebrow, slowly. “And why should I do that?” she asked, advancing a step. “I don’t need to bargain with you at all. I could put you under the ground at a single thought.”

“No.” My hand clenched around the handle of the knife in my pocket. “I don’t think you can, actually.”

The other eyebrow rose to join the first one. “Oh?”

“I don’t think you’re used to people coming to your garden awake,” I said. My voice was shaky but there. “I think usually your burrowers put them out for you. That’s why you tried to offer me the fruit. I think you aren’t used to people coming to your garden with power of their own. And I think if you could put me underground at a single thought, you wouldn’t have offered me a trade in the first place.”

There was a pause. And then the corners of the witch’s mouth lifted, and the feeling of laughter quivered all through the garden. The feeling of power increased.

I had been pulling my words out of the air. At that laughter, they suddenly felt hollow, and I wondered if this was all part of the trick—if I’d walked into a trap and was doing exactly what she wanted me to. If this dance were what she was after. I wanted to step back, put my back against something, but the garden was all around me.

“You offer me the chance to lose you both,” the witch said.

“Or win us both,” I said. “You could put me under the ground of my own volition. How many people have you done that to, in your lifetime?”

The light in the garden flared brighter, just slightly. The witch’s eyes were sharp. “All right,” she said. “But the terms are mine.”

“I’ll hear them first.”

“I’ll set your Kasia free,” she said. “But you must lead her out of the woods, the whole journey, without once looking at her or touching her or speaking to her a single word.”

I waited for a moment to hear the rest of it—the part that involved magic; the part that would be impossible. But that seemed to be it.

I wasn’t such a fool as to think it would be easy. But…it wasn’t impossible. It could have been so much worse.

“Agreed,” I said.

***

The witch made me turn around while she got Kasia out of the ground. “It starts as soon as she’s awake,” she said. I turned, but I could still feel it: the quivering in the power that made up this place. There was a snap, like a string breaking.

“It is begun,” the witch said. The air in front of me shimmered: a path, appearing at the end of garden. A way home, if I wanted to trust it. 

I strained my ears behind me. I couldn’t hear anything: not a word, not a step, not a breath. Was Kasia there? Was she still in a trance, like the bodies beneath the ground? And if she were, would she follow me?

The urge to turn, to see, to say something, made me grind my teeth together. I held myself steady and walked forward.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to lead someone anywhere without talking to them or looking at them. It would have been fine, if Kasia had made noise. But she was light-footed by nature—or she wasn’t making noise, because she was floating by magic—or she wasn’t there at all. There was no way for me to tell which one. I kept finding myself pausing instinctively, to give her time to catch up, but all that would do was make it more likely for her to bump into me.

I clenched my hands into fists and kept going. With each step away from the garden, it got harder for me to believe that she was behind me. What if I got all the way back to the cottage and turned to find she was still in the garden? I had to fight the urge to check every single moment.

It had taken a full night of walking for me to reach the garden. But I hadn’t taken a direct path, and the last bit of the journey had been by magic. I had no idea how long it would take us to walk back. I thought of the longest possible time I could conceive of it taking, and then I doubled it and tried to mentally prepare myself for it to be even longer than that. And I tried to convince myself that I was on the right path—that it was actually taking us home.

If Kasia weren’t behind me, I could go back tonight—

A voice inside me cried out at the thought, at the impossibility of doing this again. I couldn’t think about it. I just had to put one foot in front of the other.

I hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime the day before. I had drunk some water and refilled my canteen at a stream during the night. When I heard rushing water ahead, I took a chance and drank more from the canteen. Then I rounded a bend in the path and saw the source of the sound, and my heart skittered like the little pebbles in the current.

I had never found the river the birds had talked about the night before. But the witch’s path led straight to it and continued on the other side. It wasn’t much of a river, and it didn’t look impossible to cross: it was moving, but not very quickly, and it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet across. It wasn’t even deep. But it was running water, and if Kasia was a spirit—

I wanted to look. I couldn’t look.

I stood on the riverbank and felt my breathing accelerate. There had to be something I could do. A bridge would do it—in the stories, spirits could sometimes cross bridges, if the stream were weak enough and the bridge thick. But I couldn’t build a bridge without supplies, and I couldn’t gather wood without turning and risking the thing that would end this whole enterprise.

I started emptying my pockets and my pack, seeing if I had anything that would help. Food—a knife—a little round stone—

The birds had told me to use it if I needed help. I did, more than I ever had, but a tiny stone wouldn’t be much use. Unless…it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other magic this night. It wasn’t impossible.

I threw the stone at the opposite bank, at the place I wanted to go.

I was hoping for a bridge. It was a grudging hope, obviously impossible, but I hoped for it anyway. Instead, what I got was a scream: tearing through the forest, like the cries of one of the birds turned impossibly loud.

I jumped back in surprise, just a few inches, and then my skin flashed hot-cold at the idea that I might have brushed up against Kasia. But nothing changed, or nothing I could feel, and I took a minute to let my breathing calm.

The wind whipped around my ears.

It took a moment for me to put things together and look up. The wind grew stronger and stronger, and my heart raced along with it, and a moment later the great gray-silver bird swooped down in a hair-tearing gust and perched on a branch that hung over the river. “How may I serve you?” he asked, tucking his massive wings against its body

I could have wept to see him. I didn’t know how it would help with the river, but that wasn’t even the most urgent question on my mind. “Please,” I said. “Is there a shade behind me?”

Straightwing’s eyes focused over my shoulder. “Do you want me to get rid of it for you?”

“No!” I said, and I found myself grinning, almost laughing. “She’s there? What does she look like? My age, long blond hair?”

“I cannot judge the ages of you humans,” Straightwing said, “but her hair is the color of straw in the sunshine, and she is wearing a color like the needles of the evergreens.”

“That’s the dress she had on,” I said, and then I had to put my hand over my mouth, because, because—

Straightwing was very patient. He perched in silence while I got myself together.

“I have to get her over the river,” I said. “But I can’t see her or touch her. I don’t—if there’s anything you can think of to do…”

“Is it only you who cannot touch her?” Straightwing asked.

“I—yes, I think so,” I said. “But what does that have to do with—”

Straightwing took off from his branch in an explosion of wings, and then he was gone, behind me. I jerked my muscles into stillness to keep from looking. “What are you doing?”

There was a pause before he answered. “I suggest you cross quickly,” he said. “I cannot maintain a position this close to the ground for long.”

I wanted to ask what he was doing, how he thought it would help—but I was more worried about him not being able to keep doing it. I scrambled down the bank into the river.

It wasn’t easy to cross. The bed was made of rocks, and I slipped and slid from side to side as I lurched across. But I managed not to fall, and I didn’t turn around.

I was wet to the waist and freezing by the time I reached the far bank. I dragged myself up onto the bank, leaving great splashes of water on the ground around me, and took a few steps clear of the bank before I stopped and gasped to catch my breath.

There was more fluttering, and Straightwing came flapping onto a branch in front of me. “That was more strenuous than anything I’ve attempted in a while,” he said.

“What did you do?” I asked.

He fixed me with his dark-gray eyes. “The wings of a bird may be a bridge for one light enough to float.”

There wasn’t enough I could say. There weren’t possibly words big enough to convey what—“Thank you,” I said, half-choking on it. “I owe you—I owe you everything.”

“You saved the life of my nestmate,” he said. “Our debts have been equal. But if you would like to continue the acquaintance, I would not be averse. It is not all of your kind who can converse with us.”

He took off in a swirl of wind, and I stared after him for a long moment before I started moving again.

It was easier after that. Not easy: I still couldn’t know that Kasia was behind me. But Straightwing had seen her, which meant she had followed me so far, and there was no reason for that to have changed. I repeated that to myself over and over, as I dragged my feet over the path. I had been awake for a day and a night and another morning at this point. My head was filled with fuzz. Kasia was behind me. I just had to keep walking. I just had to…

That was how it was, until the forest changed.

I had been surrounded all night by plants I didn’t recognize. They didn’t look as eerie in the light of day, and I didn’t have the energy to be afraid of them—it might have been better if I had, because at least that would have been distracting. But I ignored them, until I noticed that I was looking at fiddle ferns, and that tree behind them was an ash, and those leaves were familiar, and those leaves, and those—

“Agnieszka?” Kasia said behind me.

I didn’t think about it this time. I grabbed hold of the shock that ran through me and I pushed it out of me: a wave of force like I’d used on the burrower, but not intended to wound, just to deter. A barrier that Kasia couldn’t touch me through.

“What’s going on?” Kasia asked, and she sounded frightened now.

My teeth ached with the strain of keeping up up the barrier. I didn’t know how I’d maintain it for however long we still had to walk. If I could drop it, and tell her—but I couldn’t.

I wanted to see her. So badly, I wanted to see her.

I lowered my chin and started walking again. The barrier moved with me, a slow lurch of power. I used what energy I could spare to crook my fingers for Kasia to follow me, and I hoped she would.

“Where are you going?” Kasia asked. I could feel the pressure of her touch at the edge of the barrier. “What’s wrong? Why can’t I…”

One foot in front of the other. It was all I could do.

It was worse than the first part of the walk. I had thought that nothing could be worse than not knowing if Kasia was behind me, but I hadn’t thought about having her behind me, bewildered and frightened, and having to hear her words as I walked away from her. 

She didn’t understand why I didn’t turn to look at her. At first she thought there was something wrong with me: she didn’t use the word “bewitched,” but I could tell she meant it; we both knew what had happened tonight passed the bounds of the normal. Then:

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice awful. “I wasn’t thinking when I ran into the woods like that. I shouldn’t have. I’m sure you’re angry—”

_No_ , I wanted to say.

“I hope you’ll be able to forgive me,” she said, and it took everything in me not to turn and reassure her.

I had been walking for half the day already. But I could easily have just as much distance before me. I had no idea of the size of this forest. I could have to lead her like this until darkness fell again. Or longer.

“I’m sorry if you don’t want me here,” Kasia said, her voice small, as the sun rose high in the sky. “If you do, please tell me.”

One foot in front of the other.

I started having vivid fantasies of holding Kasia’s hand. Every time she spoke, I imagined how it would feel to have her hand in mine. We’d held hands from time to time—often as young children, and very occasionally now when it was very cold and we were in front of the fire. It had been years since I’d held her hand on something like a walk through the woods. But I could picture it so vividly, and I imagined how good it would feel, being able to offer her that reassurance. Getting that reassurance in return.

I pushed more energy into the barrier and stumbled along the path.

The sun had passed its zenith and was starting to fall again when Kasia spoke again. “Agnieszka,” she said, as she’d said so many times that day, but this time her voice was different. Resigned. “I’m sorry. I realize now I shouldn’t have followed you.”

I went stiff and stopped moving.

“I always told myself that it was all right what I was doing,” she said, her voice so small that I wanted to hold her and fix it. “That it was selfish, keeping you from—from everything you should have had, everything normal, but that it was all right, because it was what you wanted. But this—”

The wind had risen. I screwed up my face against it.

“I don’t know what happened last night, or what you’re thinking now, but I’m sorry it took so long to—to see what was obvious,” she said. “I’m sorry for following you. I’ll find my own way back.”

I whirled around, a _no_ on my lips, and—she was gone.

For a second a thought it had all been an illusion: that Kasia had never been there, and the witch had made me hear her voice. That she was still back in the ground in the garden. But no, she had been there. It was just that I had put her back in the ground by turning and looking. The most important thing, and I had ruined it.

Then I saw the hole in the ground.

I opened my mouth and shut it again. I couldn’t speak, not if I might be speaking to Kasia. Not if there was still a chance. 

While I was still deciding, a voice rose from the depths of the pit: a thick, talking-through-earth voice. “She is your most important thing.”

I gaped. I started to laugh. It was a half-crying laugh, with an edge of hysteria. “Yes,” I said to the burrower. “Yes, she is.”

“Agnieszka?” Kasia’s voice came from the bottom of the hole. “Are you up there?”

There was a coil of rope in my pack. I tied it to the nearest tree and threw the end of it into the hole. I kept my hand on the rope until I felt resistance, and then I turned my back to the hole and helped her pull herself up.

I knew she was up when the rope slackened again. She didn’t say anything, but I could feel the uncertainty in the silence between us. The conversation from a moment before was still in the air.

The barrier had come down when I’d turned, but I pushed it into existence again. It was easier than before: I was learning not to throw everything I had into it. I put it in place, and then I bit my lip and decided it was worth it.

“Thank you, burrower,” I said. “Thank you for saving Kasia when I would have lost her.” I swallowed. “Please, if you’re able, continue to guard us so that I can lead her home.”

It made a snuffling sound that I took for assent, and I heard the tumble of the earth moving again. I started walking.

It was another several hours before we got back. But it wasn’t painful in the same way anymore. Kasia didn’t say anything, but I knew she was there; the burrower would have done something if she hadn’t been. It was only my fatigue I was fighting, and my impatience. I wanted to see her face. I wanted to touch her hand and know she was alive.

The sun was low in the sky when our cottage came into sight. It was the best thing I had ever seen.

I stepped off the path, out of the trees, and kept going until I reached the far corner of the house. I didn’t know how far I had to go to be safe. Finally, when it seemed like I must have passed the margin of safety at least twice, I dropped the barrier and turned.

Kasia was a few feet behind me, her face streaked with tears and dirt, there and alive and real, and I was wrong about the cottage being the best thing I’d ever seen.

“You—” I said, and her face changed, and we were rushing towards each other, and then our arms were around each other and she was safe, safe.

“I was so scared,” I said into her hair. “I was so…” And then my lips were pressed to her neck, and she was gasping in my ear, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t take it, and I turned my head and put my mouth on hers.

It was a movement of desperation; I didn’t understand what I was doing. Kasia was the one who turned it into a kiss. She was the one who licked my mouth open and pressed sweet kisses to it until I was shivering in her arms.

Her head filled the palm of my hand. Her hair fell about my face. I couldn’t breathe for kissing her. I had never known I wanted to do it, but it was all I wanted now.

She led me into the cottage. Her body against mine was a revelation, one that broke me into cries of pleasure so sharp it was almost pain. I had seen the shape of the absence in our lives, but not what would fill it; now I knew that Kasia filled it: the warmth of her skin, the brush of her nose against mine, the startled way she gasped when I moved against her. I clung to her, and we cried out together.

Afterward, she held me and I told her everything that had happened. She was silent while I talked, and then she said, “Yes. You were right to make the bargain you did. I wouldn’t have wanted to go on without you, knowing you’d traded your life for mine.”

We needed to get up. We needed to eat, to drink, to wash. But we lay together and slept; and we woke up when the night was dark, and Kasia’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight as we fed each other fruit and bits of bread. When we went back to sleep, it was with our arms around each other, Kasia’s body pressed to mine, in the cottage we had made our own, and there was nothing in the world I would have wished for that I didn’t already have.

***

It was a year and a half later when I went back to face the witch.

I had wanted to go earlier. But I had to be sure I was strong enough to face off against her. I had to spend long months feeling out my own power—in secret, for my eyes and Kasia’s only—until I could go back and free the others, or give them peace.

The ground didn’t open under me this time; the burrowers and I had an understanding. The paths tried to pull me astray, but I kept an image of the grove in my mind and whispered the words under my breath that would lead me there.

Finally I reached the place where the forest opened up and the taste of power was bitter on the air. I stood at the break in the trees, wind whipping my hair. If I focused, I could hear the flapping of the birds who would stand with me if it came to a fight.

The grove looked different in the daylight. The glow of the plants wasn’t visible under the sun, and I could see how many of them were drooping. How many husks of dead plants were among the living. It was obvious, in the daylight, that this was a place that was dying.

I couldn’t see the witch, but her power was all around me. Woven into the branches and roots, strengthening the fragile threads of life. Spread too thin, stretched too far. But dangerous. She wouldn’t make a bargain this time; she wouldn’t risk losing. She would snatch up whatever power she could get from me, and I would end up under the ground if I failed.

I took a few steps into the grove. I couldn’t feel the witch’s presence yet, but if she came close, I would notice. I wove the air around me as I went, coaxing it to act as a shield against attack. I readied the fire that would spin out of my fingertips.

“They’ll take it from you, too,” the witch said.

I jerked in surprise. I had been focusing every sense to find her, but there she was, right in front of me, next to a tree, her power too blended with that of the grove to detect. She was as old as I remembered from last time, but I hadn’t remembered how frail she looked: small and thin and bent, like the oldest of the old women who sat in rocking chairs in Dvernik all day because they were too weak to walk. But the appearance was a lie. She hummed with power.

Now was when I should have set her bones ablaze, but I hesitated. “Take what?”

“Were you going to use fire?” she asked. “That’s what they used the last time.”

So others had tried and failed—or at least that was what she wanted me to think. I held onto the banked power in my fingertips. “Last time?”

“Last time they took my children from me.”

For a moment a response was on the tip of my tongue—that they weren’t her children, any more than Kasia had been. Then her words turned sideways in my mind, and a different meaning opened up.

Her children.

“They didn’t want my fruits,” the witch said. Her voice had gone distant. “They were always closed-minded, so far from the capital. They whispered…and one night I woke up to find us all in flames.”

My stomach was rolling in my gut, slow and sick. I wondered which house it had been—not the cottage, but one of the larger houses in the town center. Maybe a house that had never been rebuilt. The people who had done it—some of their children would still be alive. “Why didn’t you do something to them?” I asked. “The people?”

“Do something?” She spread her hands with a half-laugh. “I was barely alive. For so many days, I lay broken in the forest. And then when I could stand and breathe and walk again…my power came from them. From him, and the children, and what we had built. I was nothing alone.”

“But you’re alone now,” I said without thinking. And then my eyes darted around the grove, where I had seen bodies outlined in the midnight light of the plants. “That’s why you take them. For power.”

She looked at me, defiant. “The ones who burned them went into the ground. They are my power now.”

I tasted sharp metal. “But these people—they’re not the ones who burned your family. They’re innocent.”

“None of you are innocent.”

“But they don’t deserve this.” I was faintly dizzy with the wrongness of it. “You have to let them go.”

“And who’s going to make me?” She took a step closer to me.

I tried to take a step as well, but I found that I couldn’t. My arms and legs couldn’t move. They were held by vines: thin ones, feather-light but strong, that must have wrapped around me without my noticing. The witch had kept me talking and pinned me.

“You will not take my children again,” she said, her eyes milky blue and wild.

The wind grew stronger. Awaiting my signal. Fire hummed in my hands and strained to jump forth. I could burn us all, the witch and her plants and the bodies trapped underneath them; I could call on the birds and maybe even escape with my life. I could do to her again what had been done before.

The fire leapt in my fingers. I forced it back up my veins and away. “What if you could have it again?” I asked.

“Don’t be a fool.” She flicked her fingers, and the vines tightened

I could feel her power closing in on me like the vines: sweet, sickly, strong. Ready to choke me if I didn’t fight back. “They didn’t burn all your children, last time.”

“Does that earn them pardon?” She was still advancing. “They burned a family, willfully, out of their own fear.”

“Yes, but—”

“There was a baby in the cradle.” Her voice had grown soft, dangerous. “I had fed her of my own breast that night. I heard her screams before the smoke choked them out and her baby-soft skin burned like roasting pork. And you think I should not have my revenge?”

“No, I—” It was getting harder to breathe. “One escaped,” I said quickly. “A girl. She—” I gasped at air that was thick with magic. “She was my grandmother.”

That gave her pause. I saw her falter for a moment and then smooth it over. “Do you think I should spare you because of that?” she asked. “You claim a tie to the child they stole rather than burned, and because of that, I should let you take my life from me?”

“I’m saying that I could be—family,” I choked out past the crushed-green smell of power. “Instead of these bodies in the ground. You could have—something real again.”

The vines around me didn’t get tighter, but they didn’t get looser, either. The suffocating sense of power hung in the air. “You are making up a story to get out of my trap,” she said calmly.

“I have fire in my fingers,” I said. It was a little easier to breathe, though I still had to fight for it. “You’ve felt it. You think I couldn’t have unleashed it at any point while you held me?” I let it pulse in my fingertips so that she would feel the power, see the glow. “I got that fire from you.”

She stared at my fingertips. I knew that they were burning red, the way they had when I’d practiced this with Kasia. Then she met my eyes again. “Why?”

“Because…” I groped for words like I’d learned to grope for magic, these past months. “Because you didn’t deserve this. Because you made good magic, once. Because I think you could make it again.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were lost. Like she had been planting seeds that were disappearing before her eyes. She reached out a hand like she was going to touch my cheek, but she drew it back. “If I let you go, you’ll escape. You’ll never come back here again.”

“I would bind myself to you,” I said. “If you dissolve your other bindings. I’ll bind myself.”

A spark of the old sharpness came back into her eyes. She turned away, towards the rest of her garden: towards the riot of leaves, all colors of green dotted with the brightness of miraculous fruits, all fed by the captive life in the soil. “You would have me trade my whole garden,” she said. “For this?”

“Yes.”

She was still for a long moment. Then she turned back towards me, and I wondered what she could see in my face: if my eyes, which were like my mother’s, were like my mother’s mother’s as well. If she had seen my cheekbones or my forehead on other faces long ago.

“So be it,” she said, and as the words dropped from her lips, I felt a ripple of power roll out from her through the garden. A relaxing, an unbinding. I couldn’t see the bodies under the soil anymore, but I knew that whatever held them there did so no longer.

The trees still stood, their fruits ripe with the life they’d already drawn. The witch went over and plucked one, round and golden, and handed it to me. “Eat,” she said.

There was a challenge in her voice: like she thought I might not really do it. I cupped my hands around the fruit. It buzzed with power, so strongly I thought even Kasia might have been able to feel it. I lifted it to my mouth and bit into it.

The taste burst on my tongue: sweet with an edge of tart, sharper than a pear and juicier than an apple and so strong it made my eyes blur for a moment. I felt the vines around me dissolving, and in their place new, invisible strands wove their way around me and into my blood. I looked at the witch, at my great-grandmother, and knew that we both felt it: the bonds of blood that should have been there since my birth.

“Bind me, too,” said Kasia, and I spun around to see her coming into the grove.

I had left her sleeping in the cottage, a kiss on her forehead and a note next to her in case I failed. She must have seen the horrified look on my face, because she said, “I’m sorry. I thought I could let you go alone, but it turned out I couldn’t.”

There was a bright blue bird on her shoulder—Windbeak, grown bigger now. Of course he had shown her the way. She couldn’t understand their speech, but the birds loved Kasia. Everybody loved Kasia.

The witch’s eyes were on her now. “You want to be bound?” she said, and I wanted to cry out against it—against Kasia being bound to anything for my sake, and especially to this place that still plagued her dreams. But she hadn’t spoken out against my choice. I bit my lip to hold back.

“If Agnieszka is bound to you, I should be, too.” Her voice didn’t waver, but her chin was high in the way I knew meant she was working to be brave.

The witch’s voice had a smile in it. “I can’t bind you to myself. You don’t have the same blood.”

I saw the relief in Kasia’s body. I felt it in my own. I took half a step toward her, ready to take her home.

“But—” The witch looked between us, eyes narrowing. “I could bind you to each other, if you wished.”

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. Then my heart gave a great pulse of hope. “But we are not—” Kasia said.

“It would not be a blood binding,” the witch said dryly.

I felt my face grow warm. I looked at Kasia just in time to see her looking back at me, her eyes wide with surprise, tentative with hope. “If you want to,” I said. “We don’t have to—”

“Of course I do.” She took quick steps toward me and took my hands. There was bright color in her cheeks.

The witch had us stand over a patch of clean grass. We held hands, fingers tangled together while she moved around us, whispering words that I could almost catch the meaning of. They brushed over my skin and pulsed at the places our fingers touched.

Finally the witch stepped back. “You don’t need fruit for this,” she said, and I looked at Kasia and the sparkle in her eyes and I caught her mouth with my own, sweet and lush and soft as the ripest fruit I had ever tasted.

I didn’t notice the witch leaving, but when we leaned our foreheads together, long minutes later, she wasn’t there. Kasia’s breath was a quick puff against my mouth, her arms warm around me. “I don’t feel any different,” she whispered.

I did feel different: my veins were swimming with the heady warmth of _Kasia, Kasia_. But I knew what she meant. “Well,” I said, leaning in to brush my lips against hers again, “there wasn’t a lot more she needed to do, in the end.”

***

The rumors reached us a few days later: of people reappearing, years after they had been thought to be gone forever. They just wandered out of the woods, with no memory of where they’d been. Kasia came back from town with a shocked look on her face one day and said that the Mazur boy was back; she had seen him. There were tear tracks on her cheeks.

I told the witch about it on one of my visits. I couldn’t tell if she’d expected it or not; her face closed off, in a way it often did when we touched on the subject of what her garden had used to be. “Good,” was all she said. “It’s not right for any parent to be without her child.” Then she went back to teaching me the words that would call water from the earth.

Her garden was different now. Most of the old plants were gone, dried up and withered away. She didn’t look at them anymore. But there were new ones growing, little branches and leaves poking their way out of the ground. And the air in the grove was calmer, less snarled with power. The witch stood straighter and her eyes were a clearer blue.

Kasia and I didn’t tell anyone about our binding. Our families still looked at us with worry and confusion from time to time, but they were becoming accustomed to things as they were. We had been accepted as a strange part of the background of the town, those two girls who lived alone near the edge of the woods and refused to be courted. Kasia and I liked it that way: no one needed to understand why we chose this life, as long as had each other. And if from time to time we wished it was not just the two of us, that there was another, smaller someone for us to hold—well, at those times, we held each other until the longing grew easier to bear.

One day, a few months after our binding, I saw a sapling growing in the witch’s clearing. It was young, like all the plants, but growing faster than the rest. I didn’t recognize the shape of its leaves, but it was just over the spot where Kasia and I had held hands and pledged hearts.

I watched it in the months after that, and before a year had passed since our binding, I caught the twinkle of golden fruits under the leaves. I was distracted during our lesson that day, looking over at the tree instead of tracking the magnetic currents of the earth.

The witch saw me watching. “Take one,” she finally said, and my pulse quickened.

I got up and went to the tree. The fruits were small and golden, and most of them were too hard to eat, but there was one that was larger than the others. It drooped from its branch, soft to the touch. It fell into my hand almost as soon as I touched it.

When I bit into it, its juices ran down my chin, and when I walked from the grove that evening, I could already feel the changes beginning in my body. When I would tell Kasia that night, she would weep; and when our daughter was born, nine months later, I would take her to the grove to meet her great-great-grandmother.


End file.
